The crappy life of a freelancer aka games journalism SUCKS

[Almaci]

Following is a crosspost, sorry for the typos in it:

Leipzig Games Convention, and everything that went wrong.
Its been a week now since Leipzig Games Convention ended and I am detached enough at this point to write about the big clusterfuck it ended up being for me.

Even before the show started everything seemed to be going wrong, shunned by Sega America and unexpectedly by Sega Europe as well because I apparently didnt play by the rules(which I actually did and I have proof of that in the form of emails authorising me certain coverage which I wont mention here any further).
Lynn Daniels from SoE said she would get back to me and never did, altough that could have been because she was very busy with the preparations for Leipzig.

I wasnt sure if I would even be going to Leipzig until about 10 days prior so the week before the show I hastily set up a bunch of meetings and got back to the companies that had invited me for press only stuff so despite the fact that I had waited so long my shedule was filling up fast.
Which surprised me because I had not expected it and this is where I made a big error.
The work load I assigned myself was as large as the one I arranged at E3, small difference being that at E3 I headed a team of 3 people(consisting of me, Zerochan and luccan as the video dude).
In Leipzig I was more or less alone with a similar workload, and this was even before the stuff I got assigned(and subsequently screwed up) for Gamespy.
But we will get to that part in a bit.

Upon checking for flights they all appeared to be full and those that were not had prices that had skyrocketed to around 2000 Euro for the 1 hour and 10 minute flight.
Hotels too seemed to be filled up in Leipzig itself so upon the recomendation of Justin Keeling who was staying there himself together with the rest of the IGN UK crew me and a few other people decided to get rooms at the SAS Radison hotel in Merseburg.
According to Justin it was pretty close to the convention center and the hotel had a free shuttle for people going to and from the convention center.
All that was left to do was find transportation.
Checked the train shedules and found a great roundtrip rate on the German luxury international bullet train(called ICE)from Brussels to Frankfurt, then switch trains there to get to Leipzig for just over 200 euro's.
Meetings set, agreements with two websites and three magazines to provide coverage, hotel booked and transportation to Leipzig taken care of, I was ready to go.

Then, disaster struck.
Monday August 21th, the night before I had to leave for Leipzig my laptop decided to die on me.
All my shedules were on it, my emails, contact details etcetera.
I aquired the laptop earlier this year and it had always worked to satisfaction and did not have a backup at hand, the last backed up state was on an external disc and on my sisters laptop as well(which used to be mine till she took it off my hands back in April) so if I couldnt solve it I would be screwed big time.
No matter what I tried all night long the laptop refused to come back to life.
The problem kept me up all night trying to revive the thing and as I became more and more frustrated and desperate my time was running out.
As soon as my sister was available I quickly explained the situation to her and asked her if my old user account was still on her laptop and if so to please let me use her computer for the games convention in case I couldnt revive mine.
My account was still there so no need to use the external April back up since that one was the same as the one on her laptop.
Still gone of course were all my appointments and meetings, I did have most of my contact info back though so as I left for the trainstation I started calling all the companies I remembered I had meetings with and a few I wasnt sure of anyway for good measure.
Giving em a really short recap of my troubles and asking them to please resend me the info for the meetings so I would know where to be and when.
Most of these calls took a while and were placed when my train was already on German soil, meaning huge roaming fees.
I needed to clear things out though so I did.
Gone however was the chance to get a few houres of sleep in the trains themselves since I had to sort my meetings out with Nintendo, Sony, THQ, BVG etcetera.

I should have arrived in Leipzig at 6.30pm, SHOULD have because sadly at the last minute the connecting train I had to take from Frankfurt to Leipzig was diverted to a different track and no anouncements were made.
I only noticed because the departure screens stated the track change and I noticed 2 minutes before my train was to depart and sadly it was a 3 minute walk.
Connection lost so off to the ticket office to get on the next train.
Assuming that I would be in Leipzig around 9pm now panic started to set in since a meeting was planned in Leipzig between me and Adam from kikizo and afterwards with Sterling from Gamespy as well(to discuss the coverage at the show).
No sleep at all and things were getting late.
Calling Sterling and Adam, telling em about my delay and rearranging the meeting times on the phone(more roaming costs) I finally arrived in Leipzig around 9.30pm.
After meeting up with Adam in a bar close to the Leipzig trainstation and awaiting the arrival of Sterling more bad news came my way.
Justin had been sadly mistaken, the hotel was not within radius of the convention center so there was no free shuttle, it would take 55 Euro and almost an hour to get there.
Met up with Sterling as well and by the time we were all trough it was around midnight and with a 50 minute cab ride ahead there still was no sleep in sight for me.
As soon as we arrived at the hotel I checked in quickly asked for a WiFi voucher(free) and had to check up on the emails of all the companies I called so my shedule for the coming days could be finalised.
Around 3am my work was done, my body was soaked with sweat and I felt horrible(remember, no sleep at all the previous night) yet I didnt care since I needed to sleep asap since hey I had a wake up call at 6.30.
It needed to be at 6.30 so I could actually take a shower and have breakfest before heading off to the convention.

Going on a 3 houre nap in two days I woke up, showered had an excellent breakfast at the hotel and given circumstances I was feeling quite well.
Hailed a cab to get to the conference center and arrived there around 8.30, plenty of time we figured to get our badges and check the place out before I had to show up at the Nintendo press conference.
Couldnt have been further from the truth.
Fear filled my heart as we approached the conference center as the sheer size of the complex became apparent.
Roughly 5 times the size of the place where E3 used to be held, about as large as the Tokyo Game Show venue.
Difference being, for TGS only 1 of the halls of Makuhari Messe is reserved for the show, in Leipzig almost the entire complex of interconnected buildings was occupied for LGC.
After taking fifteen minutes to walk to the building where we were told to pick up our badges and standing in line for almost an houre we were asked to fork over 52 Euro each for the badges.
When asked why we should pay when we were invited press we were told we had been standing in the wrong line in the wrong building since apparently the line we were in was for paying industry invited people.
Apparently the system did show the correct names but the people handling them could only see that we were legit and not that we were press since the registered press was handled by a different department using the same database but with a slightly altered program.
So of Adam and I went for another 10 minute walk to the press centre to pick up our badges.
We were received a full acces security card(allowing you to go to the sections the general public cant enter during the public days) and badges.
We found out the next day that we had received the wrong badges(fansite instead of press) when on the first public day security personell wouldnt let us enter the businness center or the press only sections, so on the second day I had to get that rectified in order to actually go to the private meetings I had waiting for me(changing my badge and arguing they made a mistake caused me to miss a meeting).

When everything was finally cleared the Nintendo press conference had already begun and i could not get a seat inside anymore.
Listening to the German Nintendo guy was incredibly boring so while standing there I had a visit by the man with the hammer.
He knocked me over the head pretty badly and from feeling OK I suddenly descendet to a state where I was awake and aware yet barely functional.
It didnt improve much during the rest of the day and most of my day consisted of trying my best to keep my commitments while constantly being in a haze.
Once the first day(businness day) at the con ended I realised that what I had feared in the morning was true, my workload was way too high and I would have to get back to the hotel as soon as possible to write about the things I had seen and played.
An imposible task given the mental and physical state I was in.
It didnt matter much for the Portuguese since that would get translated anyway so no worries there about structure, punctuation etcetera, no worries for the mags either since I could do those after the show thanks to deadlines from early to mid September.
The web stuff though, that was something else entirely because they need articles that need as little editing as possible(preferably no editing at all of course but considering English is only my third language I do make some weird mistakes from time to time) as fast as possible.
And there I failed horribly, when I see the stuff I wrote in germany I feel deeply ashamed for the crap I turned in and therefor would like to use this opportunity to once again apologise profoundly to the sites I let down.
My writing from Germany during the show consisted of about 4 articles/previews a day in two different languages(Dutch and English) and took me longer to write badly then it generally takes me to write well.
It also kept me up every night till around 3am when yes I had to get up every morning at 6.30am so I averaged under 15 houres of solid sleep in the 5 days I was in germany, and that was coming of a night of no sleep at all.
So you can imagine that my physical and mental state didnt improve as the show went on.
Getting up at 6.30am every day and not being able to get back to the hotel before 8pm, having to start writing on an empty stomach waiting for room service to bring some sandwiches or a burger, drinking a gallon of coffee to stay awake and finish less articles then promised.
It was a total disaster and a losing battle, one I could not win.

Even after the show things didnt improve.
My train back to Belgium left in the morning so again I had to get up at 6.30 so no chance to get a few houres of extra sleep.
The plan was to drink a few cans of powerdrink(courtesy of Konami, they gave me a few cans of PES6 energy drink) to stay awake, work on the trains back home so I could upload some more articles/previews as soon as I got home and then head to bed for as much sleep as possible.
The first part worked out great, I was active on the train and finished 5 pieces from a higher quality then anything I had managed to write down during the show itself.
And then it happened, my final stroke of bad luck.
I fell asleep on top of my sisters laptop on the last 30 minutes of the 9 houre trip back home and as the conductor awoke me to tell me I had arrived at my destination(not the final destination of the train so if he had not noticed I would have been way of track) the laptop slid from under me and fell on the corner closest to its hard drive.
Screen busted and hd dead, all my work for nothing.
My sister was seriously pissed about that for obvious reasons and I was once again screwed, after the clusterfuck in Leipzig I was unable to deliver the coverage I had promised to have ready after the ride back home.
This trip even before it began was Murphy's Law examplified, almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

Leipzig Games Convention itself then.
At first I got aggrevated by what seemd to be a crappy organisation, the sheer size of it all and the fact that everything seemd so spaced out compared to the compactnes of E3.
But now that its over I understand that it needs to be more spaced out because on Friday around 100.000 people were present at the show so from a logistical point of view its taken care of way better then TGS and the organisation is still in its debugging phase with regards to International press so I expect that to improve greatly by next year.
On a personal level I made a hge error by underestimating the event and by having a severe lack of preperation.
LGC is growing in importance(especially now with the demise of the old style E3) and looks like it could become THE single biggest event for videogames so for next year I will be better prepared and will book and arrange meetings well in advance, more time will be set between individual meetings as well so I dont have to cut them short or cancel when a meeting runs out.

PS: I quickly wrote stuff down without much thought and while a lot more happened and there is a lot more I could say ill end it now since it already is way too long.

[Cowutopia]

www.livejournal.com

Also, TLDR.

Also also, cotc.

[Almaci]

TLDR?
cotc?

What does that all mean?

[FirstBlood]

lol looks it's Almaci.

[James]

Advice for next time- Dump a full day's work, just blow it off entirely. Sleep, rest, do what you need so that everything else you can do is done well. It's a lousy choice to have to make, but it will pay off in the end. Sometimes you just need to reboot, no matter how inconvenient it is.

-edit- Oh yeah, some new silly acronyms showed up while you were out. No idea about LOTR, or whatever, but COTC can be found in the Discussions forum under, logically enough, the COTC thread.

James

[Dyne]

can somebody write down the condensed version?

[Tommy Tallarico]

TLDR = Too Long Didn't Read

[Cowutopia]

TNL is not a blog. Unless you're in the I'm Drunk thread.

[Aurora]

<3 cotc

[Almaci]

Advice for next time- Dump a full day's work, just blow it off entirely. Sleep, rest, do what you need so that everything else you can do is done well. It's a lousy choice to have to make, but it will pay off in the end. Sometimes you just need to reboot, no matter how inconvenient it is.

-edit- Oh yeah, some new silly acronyms showed up while you were out. No idea about LOTR, or whatever, but COTC can be found in the Discussions forum under, logically enough, the COTC thread.

James

Yeah, in retrospect i should have, problem was I arrived the evening before and i couldnt really afford to miss the meetings and press cons and things from there got progresively worse.
And since this is my livelyhood I figured I would manage.

TNL is not a blog. Unless you're in the I'm Drunk thread.

Fuck off if you dont like it.

No one is forcing anyone to read it all so if you bitches dont care stay the fuck out of the thread.

With that atitude of yours I bet you are either too young to vote or even worse, you voted for Bush.